The programme of keeping children away from religion may seem utopian. When Richard Dawkins argues that there is no such thing as a Christian child or a Muslim one – though he does, I think, believe that there are atheist children – this is a complaint against the way the world is. Stupid or evil people will insist on bringing their children up as "Christian" or "Muslims" and weak-willed, squishy-minded governments go along with this. But there is hope for Dawkins now. There is a backlash in favour of enlightenment from an unlikely quarter.

Tajikistan is the smallest, poorest country in central Asia. When the Soviet Union broke up it was engulfed in a vicious civil war for years; the economy now depends on a mixture of remittances and aluminium mining. But it is a world leader when it comes to ensuring that religion remains a purely private matter. The news service Forum 18 reports that the Tajik government has banned religion for children.

The simple grandeur of last year's draft bill has been watered down: the version presented to parliament then would have banned all children from attending any religious worship at all. But the present law says only that "parents are obliged … not to let children [or] teenagers participate in the activity of religious organisations, with the exception of those officially enrolled in religious education (excluding funerals and mourning events)". So Tajik children may now legally attend granny's funeral, despite the danger of catching religion there.

The law was passed almost unanimously by the lower house of parliament last month: only two deputies, both from an Islamic party, voted against. It will almost certainly become law next month. The new law does allow for official religious education, but there is a slight problem even here.

There are around 2.5 million children under 15 in Tajikistan; under less enlightened regimes around 90% of them would be described as Muslim. Since the government presently licenses 13 mosques as places of religious education, there may be a problem with class sizes, but there are plans to license as many as 61. This represents a four-fold increase in provision, so it is surely absurd to say that the Tajik government isn't trying.

Yet still the human rights groups pick nits. The law, they say, violates all the provisions for religious freedom in conventions that the Tajik government has signed. But then they're always complaining about Tasjikistan. Amnesty International says that torture is widespread and practised with impunity by the police there. Human Rights Watch concluded last year that "despite a few small positive steps, Tajik authorities continue to violate rights affecting areas ranging from elections and media freedoms to religious liberty and women's rights".

But, of course, they have to. The Tajik attitude to human rights is an essential precondition to any serious attempt to drive religion out of children's lives. To speak for a moment without irony, this nasty law in a dictatorship does raise an important point of principle. It draws attention to the fact that religious freedom is the freedom to teach things that are untrue and may be pernicious – but that's because it is freedom, and not because it is religious.

The madrassas that the government is trying to close or abolish almost certainly teach creationism, sexism and all kinds of other offensive untruths. Yet despite all that, religious freedom is still more valuable than its opposite, which is dictatorship: the wholly untramelled power of a government to demand that people believe lies. Dawkins and his friends have flirted with the idea that bringing up children as fundamentalists is a form of child abuse, and should be treated as such by the state. But the state that can treat it like that would be worse than the evil it attempted to stamp out.